MINDSET TRAPS OF PARENTING TEENS AND THE EMPTY NEST—TRAP #11: RESISTING REALITY. WHY LETTING GO WITH YOUR BIG KID FEELS SO HARD AND WHAT IT'S COSTING YOU | EP. 271
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest Podcast, where we moms of teens and college kids reframe what letting go really means to feel more connected, confident, and at peace. I'm your host, Master Coach Jennifer Collins.
Have you ever hit one of those moments with your big kid where every part of you is just thinking, absolutely not, this cannot be happening? Look, I know that feeling. And there's a real reason it shows up for so many of us moms. Today I'm continuing the mindset trap series with a trap I call resisting reality. It's what happens when we fight against what's actually true in our lives.
You'll learn how this trap sneaks up on you and what it's costing you. And I'll talk about what happens when you stop fighting reality and instead choose how you want to show up to it. This conversation isn't about giving up. It's about getting your power back and choosing what you actually want instead of burning energy on a war you can't win. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend.
I want to start this episode by telling you a story about a period of time when I thought I was losing my son. This young man has always been this incredibly earnest, thoughtful, kind, and loving kid. He and I also had this really special relationship when he was little.
He's always been someone who thinks deeply about things. He wants to do the right thing. And he's always been incredibly motivated.
He pushed himself without me having to. And I realized in retrospect what a gift that had been, but also how much it made my life as a mom easy. Because if I were to paint a picture of exactly what I wanted for my sons and the type of relationship I wanted with them, I felt like I had that with my oldest.
But then overnight, something changed. In high school, he got involved in a relationship. And at first, I was really happy for him.
He deserved to feel that joy of liking someone and having them like you back. And at first, he told me everything about how he felt in this relationship, how much more confident he felt, and how much he really liked this young woman, how interesting and talented she was. It was new and exciting.
And it was great. Until I started noticing that he was spending a lot of time on the phone, staying up really late, not getting much sleep. This is a kid who had taken on a lot during his junior year in high school.
And it was a lot without a girlfriend. But then later on, that additional distraction in my mind, and it seemed like a recipe for disaster. So I wasn't shy about trying to get him to understand that he had to figure out how to balance his relationship with the rest of his life.
Well, what started as good intentions on my part spiraled downward. My son and I started getting in arguments. It was the first time I'd ever experienced power struggles with him.
And it was exhausting. He started getting this guarded look in his eyes. And at times, he would even question me pretty aggressively.
When I would try to give him advice on his goals and his schoolwork, my perspective on what he needed to be doing, he started calling me controlling. And at first, I was naturally defensive. And I'll admit, I was pretty vocal about blaming his relationship for how he was changing.
I kept thinking that I could get him to see it. I feared he was throwing away all of his hard work. I couldn't let it go.
I felt like I needed to tell him why he was wrong. And I remember feeling pretty justified in feeling the way I did. But over time, things between us got worse.
He stopped talking to me altogether. He was rarely home, totally ignoring curfews. He wouldn't come home when he said he'd come home.
And needless to say, I got even more angry and frustrated. Because no matter what I tried, nothing seemed to be working. I tried to talk to him rationally.
But when that didn't make an impact, I'd threaten consequences. There were definitely more than a few times when I yelled. I felt like I was losing my mind.
What was even worse was that I felt like I was losing my son. He was involved in something that scared me. Because it was changing him in ways that I didn't like at all.
After a while, I could see it in his eyes. The way he looked at me. It was this heartbreaking combination of disappointment and judgment.
And even dislike. It was like, here I am, the same mom. The one who loves and adores you.
But suddenly, I felt like the enemy. It was a really dark time for my family. I wasn't sleeping.
My worry and frustration about what was happening felt all-consuming. I was beside myself. And I was constantly thinking, he shouldn't be acting like this.
And I shouldn't feel this disconnected from my own child. I was angry at him. I was angry at his girlfriend.
Here I was, feeling like I did everything right. Why is this happening? But then, of course, I questioned even that. Did I do everything right? Ultimately, from where I was standing, this wasn't how it was supposed to be.
I was doing literally everything I could to try to hold on to my son. I wanted to make it better. To fix it.
To bring him back to the version of him that I knew. But what I was really doing was fighting reality. I didn't want to believe that this was the new normal.
And I absolutely refused to just give up and accept that this was who my son was becoming. I remember so clearly that moment when I realized how hard I was fighting against what I didn't want. And what I realized, even in the midst of that really painful time, was that I was caught in a mindset trap that was making all of it worse.
I was resisting reality. And I want to stop and say that if you find yourself in a similar situation with your big kid, or just in the middle of any painful situation that you don't want, your natural response to hearing that you might be resisting reality could be to think, so what? Am I just supposed to accept this? To throw up my hands while this happens? While my kid pulls away or makes bad choices? I'm supposed to just be okay with it? Because here's the thing. We think that if we stop trying to fix it and make it better, that it means that what we're really doing is just giving up.
But this is what I want you to hear. My advice is to absolutely not give up. You don't have to pretend to be okay with things that aren't okay, or to condone behavior that you disagree with.
You also don't have to stay silent when something needs to be said. The antidote to resisting reality isn't just accepting reality and giving up. Instead, it's about giving yourself a new kind of power.
The power that comes when you stop fighting the reality of what is, and start responding to the reality that exists from a place of peace and compassion. As we raise and launch our kids, resisting reality is a really tricky trap because it feels like love. It honestly feels like you're living up to your responsibility to be a good mom.
But what I've learned is that this trap is actually a form of war. It's our mind's way of fighting against the truth of what's happening. And the cost of that war is your peace and your presence, your ability to be in your life.
And maybe most importantly, it costs you your ability to connect with your big kid as they are right now. So in this conversation, I want to show you how this trap shows up in ways you might not even realize, and why it's completely normal that we fall into it as moms. So let's take a step back and define this trap.
Resisting reality is what happens when you see something in your life, your big kid's behavior, maybe a change in your relationship, or it could even be the reality of how you feel, and your mind says, no, this isn't how it's supposed to be. I refuse to accept this. When you're in this trap, you're not just disappointed that things aren't what you want.
You can feel emotionally unwilling to accept what's happening. It just feels wrong, unacceptable, like you want to fight against it. Earlier in this mindset trap series, I covered the should trap, when we think things should be different.
And it might sound like this trap of resisting reality is similar or related, and that's definitely the case, but let me cover how they differ. The should trap is about expectations. It's that inner manual or rulebook you have about how you want your life to go, and it measures reality against what you want.
So it's all these shoulds that we have in our mind. My team should be more responsible. We should be closer than this.
And often what happens with the should trap is that you have these expectations, and then you see how reality falls short of them, and you feel judgment about that. Basically, you make the difference between reality and your expectations mean something about you, or your child, or your life. In contrast, resisting reality is about refusing to emotionally accept what's already happening.
It's less about your expectations and more about your reaction to the fact that your expectations haven't been met. It's that moment when you find yourself thinking, I refuse to accept that this is where we are. Here's the difference in simple terms.
The should trap lives in your head. It's essentially the judgment that this means something's wrong with me or wrong with them. But resisting reality lives not only in your head, it shows up in your reaction to what's happening.
It's a refusal to respond to what's actually true, whether or not you're even consciously judging it. Here's an analogy that might help. So imagine you're standing in the rain without an umbrella.
If you're caught in the should trap, you could definitely be disappointed that it's raining. You might have gone about your day assuming or having an expectation that it would be sunny, and then it rained. So you're naturally disappointed because reality didn't match your expectations.
But then in the should trap, you start to judge yourself. I should have checked the weather. I should have known better.
I should have been more prepared. But you still put your hood up. The should trap doesn't stop you from adapting to the rain.
It just adds these layers of judgment and self-blame on top of getting wet. Now in that same rain, resisting reality sounds like not only am I disappointed that it's raining, but I refuse to accept that it is. So here, instead of putting up your hood or ducking under an awning, you're standing there, arguing with the sky, getting soaked because some part of you is still fighting the fact that it's raining at all.
So the should trap adds judgment to your experience. But resisting reality blocks you from responding to your experience at all. It might sound like a silly example.
I mean, why would you stand there yelling at the sky when it rains? But believe it or not, in other situations in our lives, we do this all the time. Resisting reality is what happens when we encounter life as it is, life that's often messy and unpredictable and disappointing, and we push really hard against it. We refuse to accept it.
And resisting reality literally keeps you frozen, gripping so tightly to what you wish were true that you can't engage with what's actually in front of you. Now let me share a few examples of what this can look like for us moms with big kids, because again, it's not as ridiculous or obvious as us standing in the rain getting soaked. Let me tell you about three moms I work with, because I want you to hear this trap in three completely different situations.
And in these examples, these moms aren't modeled off of one client in particular. But I've run across these similar situations so many times that you can think of this as an illustrative situation. And I also want to be clear that this trap doesn't just show up when a kid's defiant.
It also shows up when they pull away or when they push back. And it also shows up when they're struggling with something you can't fix. So as I share these examples, see if you can recognize yourself in any of these.
Patricia's daughter is 17. And lately, every conversation she has with her daughter turns into a fight. Patricia asks her daughter to be home by 11.
And her daughter says, that's ridiculous. None of my friends have a curfew that early. Patricia asks her to lower her voice or speak respectfully.
And her daughter says, you can't control how I talk to you anymore. It feels like no matter what Patricia does, her daughter pushes back. Every conversation turned into a debate.
And Patricia couldn't help but feel like she had to win and keep holding her ground or else she'd lose all authority completely. So she'd engage in these arguments with her daughter, trying to get her to see the importance of holding to the curfew. Her daughter had to work the next day.
Her coming home in the middle of the night was disruptive to everyone. It woke up the dog. She was ultimately trying to convince her daughter to admit that the rule was reasonable.
But here's how this mom was resisting reality. Her daughter was pushing back, full stop. That's what this particular kid was doing.
And Patricia found herself getting angry that this is what her kid was doing. And look, it would be so much easier if we could set boundaries and our kids would say, okay, mom, no problem. And some kids do this.
But if your kid is pushing back and seems to be testing every boundary you set, the question really becomes, are you winning? By resisting the reality of that. Now, again, you might hear this and think the solution is just to let it go and drop all of your boundaries. But that is not what I'm saying.
Patricia can absolutely still hold the curfew. And she can enforce consequences that are in her power to enforce. Like taking away the car, for example.
The challenge is we set rules and expect our kids to like them. And so when they don't, and when they don't follow them, we find ourselves falling into the trap of wanting them to agree with our rules before we can feel okay enforcing them. We resist our kids' resistance.
And we end up in the same arguments, looking for the thing to say that'll get our kid to agree with us. And what I see even more is that we do this simply by telling our kid what they should be doing differently and never actually enforcing any real consequences. We think our kids should do what we tell them because we said so.
That argument doesn't always work. So we're caught in this perpetual power struggle without realizing that we can actually stop fighting. Look, if our kids agree with the boundary and they comply with them, great.
But when they don't agree with them and they refuse to follow through, then the only way we can actually enforce that boundary is if we have the power to enforce it. So often we try to get our kids to meet expectations. We don't actually have the power to enforce.
And when we resist the reality of that, we never win. And in fact, we end up pushing our kid further away, damaging the relationship rather than facing the reality that our kids can actually do what they want. And if someone needs to be the winner, it's often not going to be us.
So the real question isn't whether Patricia can get her daughter to agree. It's whether she's willing to actually enforce the boundaries that are hers to enforce and let go of needing to win the argument first. Here's another example.
Robin's son graduated college last spring and moved back home. And a year later, he still hasn't found a job. He sleeps late, scrolls on his phone all day.
And when Robin asks about his job search, he shuts down or he snaps back at her. Robin told me, I keep thinking this isn't what I pictured. He was supposed to be launched by now.
So Robin kept pushing. She kept forwarding job listings and asking him if he'd made any progress getting interviews. She was getting increasingly frustrated and felt, frankly, taken advantage of.
She loves her son and she wants to support him. But she also didn't imagine him coming back home and not being motivated to go out on his own. And on the one hand, there were real reasons.
Robin knew her son struggled with depression and anxiety. She was also frustrated that he wasn't consistently taking his medication. Instead, he was vaping most nights.
The word Robin kept using with me was trapped. She didn't know how to help him get motivated. And she didn't know how to stop feeling so resentful about it.
Here's where Robin was resisting reality. And it wasn't just about her son. It was about her own choices.
Robin had chosen to let her son move back home. She also hadn't asked him to contribute financially. She hadn't put a timeline on how long he could stay.
So there was no real pressure on him to change anything. Robin kept getting angry at her son for taking advantage of a situation she herself had created and was actually still choosing to create every day to keep the peace. This is the part we often don't want to look at.
Now, you get to decide whether you give your kid money. You get to decide whether they stay in your home and for how long. Those are real decisions that are in your power to make.
But you cannot make those choices and then blame your kid for taking advantage of them. The truth is, you've let your child come home for a reason. So the question worth asking is, what might change if you actually owned that reason instead of resisting it? Let's look at one more example.
Michelle's daughter is 16, still living at home. And lately, she's not just distant, she's openly hostile. She rolls her eyes at almost everything Michelle says.
She'll say things like, why would I want to talk to you? In a tone that's genuinely mean, not just teenage attitude. When Michelle tries to do something kind, like picking up her daughter's favorite coffee, her daughter either ignores it or makes a cutting comment about why Michelle's even bothering. Michelle shared with me that she felt like she was always walking on eggshells in her own home.
She had tried to rehearse what she was going to say before she said it, trying to find something to say that wouldn't get thrown back at her. She also stopped inviting her daughter to do things because she couldn't handle one more rejection. Underneath it all, Michelle kept thinking, this isn't who I raised.
She shouldn't be allowed to talk to me like this. Now, Michelle wasn't wrong to want to be treated with respect. But she was resisting the reality that right now, this is how her daughter is choosing to relate to her.
Maybe not forever. And not because Michelle failed as a mother, but this was just what's true right now. And Michelle was so busy being shocked and hurt by it, but she never got to the real question, which is, given that this is what's actually happening, what do I want to do about it? Accepting your daughter is being openly hostile doesn't mean you have to tolerate it.
It just means you stop being shocked and hurt long enough to decide how you actually want to respond. Instead of spending all of your energy wishing it weren't true. I've shared three completely different situations with three different kids.
A kid who pushes back, a kid who's struggling, and a kid who's pulling away. And in each of these situations, these three moms are in the same trap, fighting against the reality of their circumstances. Now, as we've talked about with all of these mindset traps, it actually makes perfect sense that our natural instinct is to resist reality.
It is a very human response to our lives, especially when we're facing painful or challenging situations. So to understand this, let's go back to the motivational triad, that default switch in our brains that causes us to instinctually seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. Now think about what happens when reality doesn't match what you wanted or hoped would happen.
In simple terms, it's not fun or pleasurable. It's actually very painful. And it most definitely feels like work.
So obviously to your brain, this is all a recipe for disaster. So it makes sense that your mind's natural response is to try to escape it. It thinks, nope, this cannot be right.
This shouldn't be happening. I have to fix this. To your brain, fighting reality actually feels easier in the moment than feeling what's true.
It actually feels more comfortable to take action, to do something, either to get mad or try to control or change something, than it does to simply sit in the pain, in the discomfort or grief or frustration of the situation. It also feels easier to blame your big kid or yourself than to feel the weight of disappointment or fear. Your mind would rather stay busy trying to change what's happening than just to stop and experience what is.
This is why resisting reality actually feels so natural. But it's just your brain doing what it's evolved to do, to try to avoid pain and keep you safe. The problem is that when we resist reality, we don't actually avoid pain.
We often compound it. Byron Katie often says one of my all-time favorite things, and that is when you argue against reality, you lose. But only 100% of the time.
This track of resisting reality, it shows up in so many ways for us moms. Sometimes it looks like us trying to control our teen's behavior by lecturing or tightening the rules. Other times it looks like trying to get them to connect or trying to anticipate problems before they happen.
Sometimes for us emotionally, it can look like us trying to stay upbeat and continue to be fine so that we don't have to feel stuck in painful emotions. But here's something interesting to consider. It's actually not the behavior or the action we're taking that's the problem.
Sometimes the most loving and appropriate thing to do is to set the boundary, or to try to connect, or to just take a breath and move on. So this trap isn't necessarily about the action we're taking itself, but the energy behind it. So let's look at the cost of this trap.
Whether your kid is pushing back, struggling, or pulling away, resisting the reality of it costs you the same three things. The first cost is to your peace. When you're resisting reality, you're in a constant state of fighting something that's actually already true.
And that fight keeps you wound up, on edge, unable to just be in the moment. And that second cost is your ability to be present in your life. You can't actually be with your teen or with yourself when so much of your energy is going towards refusing what's happening.
And the third cost that we experience when we fall into this trap is our connection with our kids. Because when you're so busy fighting what is, there is no room left for curiosity or compassion. We're not able to meet our big kid where they actually are.
So one way to think about these situations is to really start asking yourself, am I responding from a place of clarity and intention? Or am I responding from some type of resistance, from anger or judgment or frustration or anxiety? Intention might look like, okay, this is what's happening. What do I want to do now? But resistance often looks like, this shouldn't be happening. I shouldn't feel this way.
And I've got to fix it. I've got to change it. And those feelings of anger and frustration and anxiety are actually driving the energy that you take every action with.
My friends, when you resist the reality of your life, when you resist the truth of the situation, it's like you lose access to all of the possibilities in front of you. But when you ground yourself in reality, in the truth of the situation, even when it's hard, you can find the power and the presence of mind to choose how you want to show up on purpose. And this is truly where your power is.
My friend, this conversation isn't about telling you what you should or shouldn't accept. It's not about giving up or doing nothing or pretending things don't hurt. It's really about getting curious about what might become possible if you stop fighting what is.
The honest truth is that when you stop resisting reality, you give yourself the chance to see it clearly. You see truly what is, not through the lens of frustration or fear or disappointment, but through the lens of objective reality. And facing that reality, even the parts that we hate, is always the starting point for real change.
This, my friend, is where your power is. Not in fighting against reality, but in responding to it with intention and clarity and unconditional love. And what this creates for you is that instead of telling yourself you shouldn't feel the way that you feel, you just let yourself feel it.
You honor what's true for you without judgment. And there's actually an incredible feeling of peace that comes from simply accepting the truth of what is. I remember this so clearly with my own son.
I had been thinking for so long, this isn't my son, he shouldn't be acting this way. And every time I thought that, I felt more hurt and angry and powerless. But the moment things started to change wasn't when he changed.
It was when I did. I stopped fighting the reality of the situation and I started responding to it with intention. This is who my son is right now, full stop.
I faced the truth of that. And then I asked myself, so who do I want to be in the face of that? The most surprising and beautiful part of this journey for me was that in dropping the fight, I started to see the reality for what it was. Often we're so caught up in telling ourselves a story about what our kids are doing or what they shouldn't be doing that we miss out on the chance to ask the question, why might they be doing what they're doing? What if this isn't about me, but simply about them, what they need, how they're doing their best, even if I don't like it.
From this lens, I could see it so clearly how my son was struggling, how he was desperately trying his best. He couldn't open up to me about it at the time, but when I stopped fighting reality, it all became so clear. The last thing I wanted was to be another place where he had to fight.
I wanted to be the one safe space that he could count on, no matter what. Even if that meant I would have to wait a really long time for him to trust me or to come back to me, I was willing to be that version of myself for him. And wouldn't you know it, when I stopped fighting what was, that was when things started returning to the version of the relationship I had been missing.
It definitely didn't happen overnight, but over time, we found ways to reconnect again because I had created the safe space for it. And this is the most important thing I want to invite you to take away from this conversation. We don't create change by fighting against what's real.
We create change when we learn how to meet reality with compassion and intention. I'm not saying it's easy, especially when it's your child and the stakes are so high. But if you've been stuck in this trap, resisting reality in your relationship with your big kid or your own emotional experience, I just want to remind you that you're not doing anything wrong.
You are human. You're a mom who cares so much. But also, you don't have to stay stuck.
This is the work we do in my coaching program, Mom 2.0. Together, we take an honest look at what you're facing right now, the pushback from your kid, the distance, the silence, the fear, and we look at it clearly, without judgment. Not so you just accept things you don't want and give up, but so you stop spending all your energy fighting what's already true and start using it to decide who you want to be in response to it. That is where your power is, my friend.
There is no question that there are parts of raising and launching our kids that are exceptionally hard. Sometimes I think we look around and because no one else is talking about it, we think we're the only ones struggling. But I'm here to tell you, you are not alone.
And this is hard. The answers are not easy. What might be different if you stopped fighting that and focused on who you want to be in the face of it? This is truly where your power is, my friend.
And this changes everything. Until next time.
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to check out my next free masterclass. There's a link in the show notes. You have more power than you think, my friend.
